Career Corner

Senior Day Speaker, 1981 grad Valerie Jarrett Has Advice for Next Generation of Leaders

By Jared Wadley, University of Michigan News Service

Senior White House advisor Valerie Jarrett, '81, took a break May 8 from advising President Barack Obama to dispense a few pearls to 310 graduating Michigan Law students instead.

"Please savor the pride and satisfaction in the challenges you've met, and the obstacles you've overcome,"Jarrett told graduates and their families at Hill Auditorium. "Let your much-deserved self-confidence carry you forward to the next phase of your life, because you will need that confidence, and it will be tested time and time again."

Jarrett talked about her career and time at the Law School in a speech delivered one week after her boss gave the spring commencement address at Michigan Stadium.

As a senior advisor to the president, Jarrett heads four White House departments: intergovernmental affairs; urban affairs; public engagement; and Olympic, Paralympic, and youth sports. Also, she serves as the Chair of the White House Council on Women and Girls.

Jarrett described four requirements for effective leadership: passion, character, resilience and courage. Graduates should care deeply about what they do, or "they will not have the endurance to sustain their effort or achieve their goals," she said.

"Resist the complacency that you will find rooted in your comfort zone and constantly challenge yourself," she said. "That's what fuels passion."

To pursue that passion, a person needs courage to trust his or her moral compass and to make tough decisions.

"The more people you inspire with your leadership, the harder it is to reach consensus, and therefore the more dissension," Jarrett said.

Effective leadership also involves resilience when failure occurs.

"Learn from your mistakes, but do not quit. And certainly do not fear trying," she said.

As it relates to character, Jarrett said she's

seen the aspirations and hopes of many people dashed by lapses in judgment decades earlier.

"Your reputation is your most important asset …. (and) is inextricably linked to the company you keep," she said, adding that graduates should affiliate themselves with good people and worthy institutions that have solid reputations and shared values.

Before attending the commencement ceremony, Jarrett visited with student groups and faculty members. She talked about public service and answered questions from members of the student-run Frank Murphy Society.

"She came across as both down-to-earth and funny, and the entire group benefited from hearing about her varied and successful career in public service," said Zach Dembo, a 1L from Lexington, Ky. Dembo is one of the founders of the society named after Michigan Law alum Frank Murphy, '14, who went on to a distinguished career in public service as Detroit's mayor, Michigan's governor, the U.S. Attorney General, and as a U.S. Supreme Court Justice.

Emily Boening, a second-year law student from Toledo, worked in Washington D.C. before coming to law school. She said her "jaded attitude" toward politics and political speakers sometimes got the best of her—until she met Jarrett.

"Ms. Jarrett lived up to the Obama Administration's commitment to candor and openness," Boening said. "She was willing to have a relaxed, honest conversation, answering questions directly, without deferring too often to talking points or platitudes—a rare and refreshing surprise."

Victors Valiant emerge from Campbell Moot Court Competition

By John Masson, Amicus Editor

The Henry M. Campbell Moot Court Competition, a Michigan Law tradition that stretches back more than 80 years, earned top team and best brief honors in April for 3Ls Jake Walker and Jane Metcalf, and a best oralist award for 2L Cheryl Palmeri.

Palmeri and classmate Rory Wellever were runners-up for the best team award.

The case being mooted involved two questions: first, whether the warrantless use of cell-site technology to locate and track a person violates that person's rights under the Fourth Amendment, and second, whether the government should be allowed to use a Mirandized suspect's response to a police consent-to-search request as part of its case-in-chief.

More than 150 students competed this year, assisted by many members of the faculty. Professors Joan Larsen, Eve Brensike Primus and Sam Gross were singled out by the student board that administers the competition for their help in designing the problem and assisting the board and competitors.

This year's judging panel for the final round included Judge Betty B. Fletcher of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, Judge Neil M. Gorsuch of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit, and Judge David S. Tatel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit.

The Henry M. Campbell Moot Court Competition was established in 1926 and honors the 1878 Michigan Law graduate who founded the Detroit law firm that became Dickinson Wright. Competition lasts much of the year, and is open to all second- and third-year students, as well as to LL.M., visiting, and dual-degree students.

Tom Whitaker, tough as the stony Vermont hillsides that cradle the farmhouse his great-grandfather built, clearly doesn't believe in aging gracefully. The hero of Emeritus Professor David Chambers' new novella, The Old Whitaker Place, speaks sharply, makes plenty of mistakes, and will do what it takes to stay in his going-to-seed family home despite his increasing pain and confusion.

Chambers' lean, elegant prose takes us unflinchingly through the closing years of narrator Tom Whitaker's life, chronicling his relationship with his son, with other people who love or at least tolerate him, and with the Green Mountain soil his life is grounded in.

Whitaker is no diplomat, and as age increasingly robs him of his independence and dignity, his occasional petulance and absent-mindedness grows. Alongside him ages his old dog Roscoe, who—unlike his master—suffers the infirmities of age without complaint. Also on hand is Tom's new wife Teresa, 30 years his junior, whose arrival has allowed Tom to remain in the house he loves perhaps more than anything else in his life.

Chambers, who retired to write fiction in 2002 after three decades of teaching law, creates a character whose fine balance of nobility and baseness won't be easy to forget. The slender work is co-winner of the 2009 Miami University Press Novella Contest. More information and ordering information is available on the publisher's website.